THE MOST DELICIOUS SAMOSAS I EVER HAD

by Shrita Pathak (Spain)

I didn't expect to find India

THE MOST DELICIOUS SAMOSAS I EVER HAD I learnt early in life that if moments feel like scenes from an indie movie, it’s worth stopping and noting. This is what happened on a random February night, as I sat in a corner shop, slightly inebriated, eating samosas with my fellow countrymen halfway across the world in Barcelona, Spain. The door to the shop was wide open and cars were rushing by with far greater ferocity at that time of the night - it was late. I could see the gentle light from the yellow street lights reflected off on the shiny roads. My American friends were smoking cigarettes right outside. Let’s backtrack a bit...to 2014. The world’s biggest democracy just elected a far-right party called the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party - which literally translates to Party of the Indian Public) and there were celebrations on the streets. I was sixteen at the time and didn’t really care about politics. My family had supported Modi and they were smiling with glee. Fast forward five years to 2019 and Modi won for a second term. I was on a holiday with my mum in Goa right after having graduated university with a major in Political Science. I started crying. My family wasn’t particularly happy but didn’t seem too bothered. Fast forward seven months to December 2019. I am teaching English in Spain on my gap year. Modi’s party has proposed for a law which strips millions of Indian Muslims, who have called India their home for generations, of citizenship. It’s called the Citizenship Amendment Act. I’m at the office Christmas party when this happens. My mother calls. I’m crying. She’s shattered. All my friends from university, and my professors, are out on the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, Pune. It’s bad. It’s Feb. I took a train to Barcelona. It’s midnight. I need a beer. Going to the corner shop by the hostel, I ask for one. Two men from Bangladesh are manning the shop. They talk to me in Urdu and I reply back in Hindi. We understand each other. I see samosas on the counter for two euros each. I ask for one. They pull a stool for me to sit on - Hum log toh ek hi jagah se hai. Aapse kya paisa len (we’re both from the same land. How can I take money from you?). I’m slightly tipsy but they seem unbothered. The three of us sit and start talking about how the samosas and delicious, and how nothing beats Hindustani food. I’m aware that it is their people being ostracized in a nation whose passport I hold. At that moment, I became aware of my upper caste Hindu privilege. Rewind two hours: I’m on a date with an American. “It’s so unfair. You can travel wherever you want whenever you want! I can’t do that - it’s as if the system of colonialisation and slavery that started over four centuries ago is still continuing in the form of systematic regionalism”. “Systemic regionalism?”, he'd scoffed. “You don’t get it. You won’t. I tired of feeling like a third grade citizen in a world that clearly favours the West”, he won’t get it. Here I sat, on this stool, eating samosas for the first time in six months. My problems suddenly felt small. There were bigger fish to fry. Waiting six hours in the sun at an embassy suddenly felt trivial in the face of my Muslim sisters and brothers dying in the face of oppression.